


Blood and Salt

by Unpretty



Series: Whispered Secrets and Neathy Delights [3]
Category: Sunless Sea
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-22
Updated: 2015-10-17
Packaged: 2018-04-22 20:36:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4849661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unpretty/pseuds/Unpretty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Always poets and always hungry, zee captains making promises they could not keep. Dying quickly or by inches, bloody and bruised and scarred and drowning. The Tireless Mechanic has his own problems, and who in the Unterzee can afford to mourn the dead? Yet the Tireless Mechanic is no stranger to debts that cannot be paid. His eyes are dark-circled, but his hands are steady.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Her mouth looked like solacefruit, but she tasted like the zee. No one else could have heard her above the sounds of the engine, but he'd been in the engines so long that he didn't hear them at all anymore, not as long as they sounded right. Steady hands made for quick work, but he took his time. Not entirely on purpose. It was easy to get distracted. Torque and pistons and lubrication and stoked fires. He hadn't gotten them mixed up enough to try and use a wrench on her, at least. Slow helped. Slow was what kept him from blowing up the ship, engines in his mind that did not map to real metal. Metal that didn't map to flesh.

"Good work, Mechanic," she said as she buttoned up her shirt, rough linen pale against her skin and dark against her hair.

"Thank you, Captain," he said as he buttoned up his trousers, and she pressed a sudden kiss to his jaw that made his head spin. Or maybe that was the exhaustion. Heat and sleep deprivation and exercise.

It was alright. As long as he kept himself moving, he was alright. Inertia would keep him going, the way it always did.

He kissed her forehead and used the hem of his shirt to rub thick black oil from her hands. No one would look askance at oil on his clothes, and slender handprints disguised themselves among larger ones. Couldn't hold hands, but handprints could hold.

He watched her head back to the helm, and only he could hear the echo of her bootheels. Another sound made him frown. A thunk, a clatter, another thunk. They were not the usual thunks and clatters. Something funny in the engine. That wasn't good. She was always so finicky, the engine. It kept him busy, at least.

It was the cold, he eventually figured out, making the fuel burn odd. The engine was used to warmer climes, insofar as London could ever be called warm these days. He'd predicted that, a bit. It had happened the last time he'd come this far North, the reason they were going now. The metal contracted, expanded, sometimes warped; that was a given, and it was built to accommodate. The noises were a surprise, though. Every engine was different. Like people. You never knew what kinds of noises they were going to make. Usually a bad sign when they screamed. Not always.

He emerged topside, surprised by the chill. He exhaled steam, and snowflakes melted against his glasses. The Sly Navigator was standing on deck, staring out into the flurry of white. The comatose ferret was tucked under his shirt, looking surly. They could not yet see Frostfound through the snow. Or maybe he could. His eyes were better than the Mechanic's, after all.

"Thank you," the Navigator said, and the Mechanic was startled.

"It's the Captain's doing," he said, "not mine. She promised."

"Promises of five dead Captains didn't get me anywhere," the Navigator said, as if the Mechanic needed reminding. "She'd never have come here just for me. Isn't cost-effective, is it? Isn't cost-effective coming here for you, neither, but she thinks you're worth the price."

The Mechanic's arms pulled tighter against his chest. He didn't care for the cold any more than the engines did. It made him feel awake. "What are you implying?" he asked, a zee of oily handprints pressed into his shirt.

"Nothing," the Navigator said with a shrug. "Just stating facts, signifying nothing."

The ferret chirped, disconsolate. The Mechanic was glad it could not speak. He exhaled steam again, and retreated to the helm.

The Captain stood at the wheel, and she gave him a secret smile over her shoulder. The secret was that it was a smile at all, when her lips did not deign to curve. He had been categorizing her smiles since before he met her, but meeting her had meant learning many new ones.

"I take it all is well?" she asked him, as if she had not seen him yet that day.

"All's never well," he said, "but the engines aren't bad. Not happy about the cold."

"No one is," she said, "except the Navigator."

"The novelty will wear off soon enough," he said.

"I'm pleased," she said, looking out at the deck. "Not about the hypothermia he's going to get," she added, in case that was a point of confusion. The Brisk Campaigner seemed to agree with this inevitability, emerging from belowdecks with a sizable scarf the Navigator could not refuse. "That he finally gets to see Frostfound." She did not look directly at the Mechanic, as if to do so would reveal something. "You've been here before—do you think that he'll like it?"

"No," he said, and he didn't need to think before he answered.

"He might," she said, though optimism had no place in the Unterzee.

"He won't."

There was a challenge in the glint of her scintillack eyes, but he wasn't the kind to rise to the bait. It reminded him of Anne-marie when she looked like that, dead on London cobblestones.

It would be alright. He'd been here before, and it hadn't killed him. Only barely, only nearly. Strength in numbers, surely, when he'd be with her all the while. His Captain took down zee-beasts and gambled with devils. No weak-hearted engineer was she, no shivering dream-thief. He gazed out the window, into the snow. He frowned.

"Zee-bats," he said, without addition or context. The Captain frowned, and touched her nose, as if her freckles might have gone awry. "No," he clarified, "zee-bats." He pointed out the window to the swarm hiding in the snow. He heard them better than he saw them, darting shadows in the whiteness, shrieking little things.

"Oh!" The Captain put her hands on the wheel as if to steer around the swarm, then paused. "Actually," she said, "would you alert the Cannoneer? They'd something new they wanted to try, as I recall."

"You're sure?" he asked, but that was not the right question.

"Are you questioning your orders, Mechanic?" she asked, with an imperious arch to an already sharp brow.

"Wouldn't dream of it, Captain," he assured her. He gave her a mock salute because it was the only kind she would accept, and in the process smudged engine grease across his forehead. She blessed him with the smile of a cat with a secret, and he kept it in his pocket to help keep him warm.


	2. Chapter 2

The Sly Navigator had not returned from Frostfound. The Captain had made her way back to the helm, but only barely. She'd assigned a zailor to man the wheel, because she couldn't stop shaking. She was not pale, because such colors were beyond her ability, but neither was she her usual shade.

He did not often call on her in her private quarters, for fear of seeming unseemly. They were quite unseemly, but they did not want to seem it. "Have you seen the Captain?" the Campaigner asked him, apparently satisfied with whatever she had found in her examination of him.

"Should I have?" he asked, rolling down his sleeves.

"Whatever it was that happened in there," she said, "you seem to be handling it better than she is." She put her things back into the large leather bag that she carried with her, eyeing him with something like suspicion. "Seem to be," she added, "but it's hard to tell with you, Mechanic."

"I've done it before," he said. "Knew what to expect." That wasn't it, not really. The Captain had borne the worst of it this time, and only now did he feel something like shame in hiding behind her like a shield. She wouldn't have had it any other way, but he also hadn't asked. Whispers and his own heartbeat had filled his ears like wool, a relief that he couldn't hear the screaming.

"Maybe you can help her through it," the Campaigner suggested, and he tried not to eye her with suspicion. What did she know, how much did she know? As much as the Navigator had pretended not to? "Might be she could use some advice."

The Mechanic fixed his cuffs, look at them instead of at the surgeon. "I'm an engineer," he reminded her. "She's not a machine."

"Not the sort you're used to," she said, heading for the door. "At the very least, you can apologize for getting us in this mess in the first place."

* * *

The Captain bore a suspicious resemblance to the ferret, in that she looked half-dead and less snuggly than she ought to have. It was hard to feel bad for the ferret, but it was easy to feel a sense of guilt about the Captain.

He ought to have warned her better; of course he should have. Too late now, and the deed was done. The Mechanic wrung his hands, approached her bedside with caution, as if the lump of blankets might conceal some dreadful revenge.

"I'm sorry," he said, not because the Campaigner had told him to, but because he was.

_She thinks you're worth the price._

She turned her gaze from a spot in the wall to him, her eyes dull and glassy until they came into a gleaming focus on his face. It was deeply disconcerting, the way they did that, seemed to focus like a lens. His Captain's gaze had ever felt like being in crosshairs. It was one of the easiest ways to recognize her.

" _Mechanic_ ," she sighed, a warmth of recognition that he was used to only hearing when she first met him. "I told you I'd do it, didn't I? I really did it, this time." Her hands emerged from the blankets, her skin raw, her arms and her palms all scratched patchwork from her own nails. She reached for him, and he could not refuse the look of faraway pride on her face. He also could not bear to look at her arms, though he knew it was only Frostfound making her skin not her own.

"Thank you, Captain," he said as he took her hands, and she beamed, too wide and too earnest. It felt like a glimpse of something he was not meant to see. He wondered if this, too, would haunt his nightmares.

"Will you stay?" she asked. "I am very cold."

"You are in luck," he said, "because I am very warm." He'd always run hot, coffee and coal in his blood, and he'd always resented the waste of energy. He could not bring himself to resent her for the cold. She rested her head on the crook of his shoulder as he settled beside her, and her shaking was more obvious when he could feel the way it traveled from her ears to her toes. Her fingers dug into his arms, and they would probably leave bruises, dainty marks like fingerprints. He brushed a thumb over the dark hollow beneath her eye. "I'm sorry," he repeated.

"Why would you ever be sorry?" she asked, and she kissed his jaw beneath his ear. "I wouldn't have made it at all, if it weren't for you." She was so close that it seemed she might crawl into his ribcage to stay, if he let her. "It sucked all the joy out of me, that place. Imagine what it might have done if you had not given me some to spare."

He did not want to imagine it. He did not have room in him for imagining, anyway. His mind was all pistons and clockwork and what few other things he could find room for around them, between infernal machines and nightmares.

He did not resent, either, the sleep that she found as her skin stole the warmth from his. There was something restful about it, watching her sleep though he could not. In his mind he was assembling an engine, as before and like he would again. He did not know what he would do when he had built it, when he had built it in his mind so many times already.

Take a nap, maybe.

* * *

He'd hardly been gone at all, he thought—just long enough to get some coffee, just long enough to be sure the Cannoneer had not done something dreadful to the engines in his absence.

The Captain was not in her bed.

Neither was she at the helm.

The zailor manning the wheel was poorly equipped to handle the fog, heavy and chewy and hiding who-knew-what behind it. The lights were high, but the fog only reflected it back, revealing nothing. He found her on the deck when he heard the scream, the splash. Neither belonged to her. Looking over the rail, he could see no body in the water, not even ripples to signify the loss. Only waves, lapping against the sides of the ship.

Her hair was aglow in the lights and the fog. She did not look entirely awake; the voids of her pupils were wider than usual. Nothing but a nightshirt covered her, and condensation had settled on swathes of bare skin.

"There was… something." She looked out to the water. "A zee-beast. It took him, and pulled him under. Grabbed him right off the deck." Her voice was as vacant as her eyes. Other members of the crew had gathered, looking overboard; they gave the Captain a wide berth. There were murmurs. She looked at the Mechanic. "You believe me, don't you?" she asked.

"Of course, Captain," he said, too loudly, adjusting his glasses as he looked at zailors behind her. He did not know if he was lying. "Come, come now; the Campaigner will have your hide, you know, if you do not get your rest." He pulled at her elbow, but she resisted.

"I can't," she said. "I need to… I need to steer. I need to… captain. I need to."

"You're no good to anyone without sleep," he said, as if he'd any room at all to talk. "Or, at least, without trousers. Yes?"

She looked down at herself. "Oh."

The zee was not like London. Scandal could not hurt her here. Even so, captains who manned the helm in their nightclothes did tend to get a certain reputation.

He was relieved when the Campaigner made an appearance, wrapped in three shawls and scowling. Her scowls scattered the crew, and he stepped away from the Captain as if he had not been ready to take her back to her room.

"Are you _trying_ to get yourself killed?" the Campaigner demanded, and the Captain was too far-gone to look abashed.

"Not usually," she said, and the Mechanic shivered.

"Well I can't tell it to look at you," the Campaigner said, removing a shawl to wrap it around the much younger woman. "A dead captain's no good to me," she said. "Keep this up and you'll be dead before I am. Back to bed with you, girl, don't think I won't lock you in there if I have to."

He watched them go, swaying against the movement of the zee.

There was blood smeared across the deck.


	3. Chapter 3

Hunter's Keep had burnt to the ground, a ruin.

It had been their last hope of getting more fuel to get them to London, but it had only wasted more of it instead, a detour if only slight. There had never been _much_ hope of getting the help they really needed, but to have the house burned down seemed insult on top of injury.

The Captain had bought more than enough supplies and fuel to get them to Frostfound and back. But then there had been the matter of the Cannoneer's new weapon. The matter of giving the helm to a zailor when there was no navigator to keep them on course. The matter of the fog, of the zee-beast no one else had seen, the matter of the lights kept burning when they were no use.

Her grip on the wheel was tight, and she had not left the helm now in days. She would trust the matter to no one else, though she shook and though the Campaigner objected.

The Mechanic's entrance was slow, hesitant; he'd have held his hat in his hands, if he wore a hat. Or owned one. The sight of her did nothing to assuage his concerns.

She looked like a ghost of herself, of all his captains. If they'd sails, her fury surely would have stirred the winds. Regrettable, then, that they didn't.

The helm was silent but for the sound of the engine, which was no sound at all. The lights of London creeped closer.

"Captain," he said finally, his voice hoarse as he ran an oily hand through his hair.

Her eyes did not leave London. "Yes? Out with it." Crisp, too crisp, words the wrong shape for the color of her mouth. He tasted rust.

"We're out of coal."

Her head swiveled to fix him with her gaze, those crosshairs that were so uncomfortable even at the best of times. "We can't be," she said. She looked again to London. "We still move."

"This is the last of it," he said, and on cue the engines belched, ground, quieted.

Her grip on the wheel tightened. "No." She released it for the first time in hours, if not days. "No, no, no." She swept past him, and he followed in her wake as she made her way to the deck.

"I'm sorry, Captain," he said after her, as if his apologies would do them any good.

"No, no, no," she said again, as if to say it would ward away the facts. She looked overboard, at the viscous zee that pulled them to a halt so close to their destination. The Surface sea would let them glide into port on inertia alone; the Unterzee was not so forgiving. She hit her palm against the rail. "Damn it all!"

A ship was approaching, one of those vulturous operations willing to offer them safe passage in exchange for all their possessions. She glared across the water with a look of pure hate.

"We can start over," he suggested, quiet.

"Never," she spat, and he flinched. What other choice did they have, but to starve in plain view of London?

"Want me to shoot 'em?" the Cannoneer asked, having come up behind the Mechanic as they spoke.

"It's your gun that got us into this mess in the first place," the Mechanic pointed out.

"I thought it was your engine," they shot back, and they were not wrong, but he would not accept that they were right either.

"Check again," the Captain said, ignoring the both of them.

"Captain?" both engineers asked at once.

"The fuel stores," she said. "Check them again."

His stomach tightened, his heart turning sideways. "Cannoneer," he said, eyes on the Captain, "go check."

"No," the Captain interrupted, before anyone could move. " _You_ check, Mechanic." She was looking at London, wasn't looking him in the eye.

"There's nothing down there, Captain," he said, tasting rust again.

"I want you to check them anyway."

"I know what you're trying to do, and I won't let you—"

"You will _not_ presume to tell me what I can and cannot do, Mechanic," she snapped, turning her gaze and her fury upon him. "You will check the fuel stores again, and that is an _order_."

The Mechanic was not a man given to great passions. They took too much energy, and there simply was not enough room for them in his head. Yet he felt a rare fury of his own rising up within him, one that set his jaw to a hard angle. He turned to the Cannoneer, their disputes forgotten for the moment. "Watch her," he ordered. "Don't let her out of your sight."

"If you say so," the Cannoneer said, though he was already leaving, quick steps trying to get the farce over with.

At first, he was relieved to find nothing. Relieved, paradoxically, to be doomed. Then he saw the corner of a box hidden in shadow, and he felt very ill.

Coal. Coal which he was very sure had not been there only moments before, coal they had not bought and should not own. He forced himself to grab the shovel, to throw it into the firebox and get the engine running again.

It would serve her right, wouldn't it, if he said he hadn't found anything. And yet that would be so much worse.

He ran back to the deck as soon as he was able, ran though his steps were unsteady and the wood was wet.

" _Marianne!_ " He fell to his knees beside her, pulling the sleeves of his shirt down over his hands to press them over the slashes in her skin, trying to staunch the bleeding. "I told you to _watch_ her," he said to the Cannoneer, who only shrugged, albeit uncomfortably.

"I did watch her," they said. "I watched her go to the rail, I watched her say summat to nobody, I watched her—"

"Go get the _surgeon_ , for goodness' sake!" The Mechanic had no bandages, the sleeves of his shirt had been the cleanest part before they'd become soaked in blood.

"We'll be in London, soon," the Captain said, sounding quite pleased with herself.

"I won't do this again," the Mechanic said, and with both hands gripping her forearms he pressed his forehead against hers to be sure she was looking him in the eye. "I won't do this, not again, I won't let you do this to me again. This is the last time, do you understand? Damn the engine—I'll find a new ship, if I have to, I won't let you have it if you're going to do this to me."

"You don't get to tell me how to run my ship," she said, attempting to pull away from him.

"If this is how you run your ship," he said, still holding tight, "I want no part of it."

"Selfish," she accused.

"I never said I wasn't," he said, "so there's no point acting surprised about it now."

Their gazes were locked in a silent war, one that persisted as the Campaigner came to take the Captain away, scowling and scolding all the while. He only stopped watching her when the Cannoneer stepped between them. "I thought her name was Lilliana," they said.

"What?"

"You called her Marianne," the Cannoneer said. "That's the ship's name, not the Captain's."

"I'm very tired," he said by way of explanation, because of course they wouldn't understand. This was the only captain they'd ever known, the only ship. Only the Sly Navigator had understood, and he was gone now. There was still the ferret, but that wasn't the same.

He sat on the deck and stared at the bloody handprints in his shirt as they pulled into port.


End file.
